Anaïs Mitchell

Hadestown

Anaïs Mitchell was born on March 26, 1981 in Montpelier, Vermont, and named after the author Anaïs Nin by her father, a novelist and college professor. She was raised on a farm in Addison County and graduated from Middlebury College in 2004 with a degree in political science. Her parents had lived on the Greek island of Hydra and read Greek myths aloud to her and her brother. She self-released The Song They Sang... When Rome Fell in 2002 and won the Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Award in 2003; Hymns for the Exiled followed on Waterbug (September 21, 2004), recorded in an old Vermont gristmill, and The Brightness (February 13, 2007) on Righteous Babe after Ani DiFranco signed her.

In 2004, driving between Virginia and home, she began shaping the lyrics that led to Hadestown. The first performance of the folk opera was in December 2006 at the Old Labor Hall in Barre, Vermont, with a small cast of friends and about sixty in the audience, followed by a school-bus tour of New England in 2007. The concept album appeared on March 9, 2010 on Righteous Babe, produced by Todd Sickafoose with Michael Chorney's orchestral arrangements, and it reached 9 on the US Americana/Folk chart. She made Young Man in America (2012), Child Ballads with Jefferson Hamer (2013) and xoa (2014). The director Rachel Chavkin saw the potential for a stage show in 2012, and a first major workshop followed in 2014.

Hadestown opened off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in summer 2016, played the National Theatre in London in November 2018, and opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 17, 2019. It won eight of its fourteen Tony nominations including Best Musical, and she won Best Original Score; the cast album won the 2020 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. She joined Bonny Light Horseman with Eric D. Johnson and Josh Kaufman for an album on January 24, 2020, and released Anaïs Mitchell on BMG on January 28, 2022. Time named her to its 100 in 2020, and her book Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown appeared that year. A film of the musical is set for a North American release on July 24, 2026.